Developmental Psychology

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Developmental Psychology

• Piaget Cognitive Development Theory

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Review STAGE THEORIES

• A stage is a developmental period during which
  characteristic patterns of behavior are exhibited
  and certain capacities become established.
• Assume that
• Individuals must progress through specified
  stages in a particular order because each stage
  builds on the previous stage.
• Progress through these stages is strongly related
  to age.

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Principles of Development

• Development is orderly.
• Development is predictable and sequential.
• Development is gradual.
• While changes in development are orderly, they
  most often do not occur abruptly, or dramatically.

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Piagets Theory of Cognitive Development

• Read pages 291-294
• Summarize/Define the following in your notes
• Cognitive development
• Sensorimotor development
• Object permanence
• Preoperational stage
• Reversibility
• Conservation
• Concrete operations
• Formal operations

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Piagets Theory of Cognitive Development

• Attempts to explain the way a child sees the
  world the way they do.

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Piagets Theory of Cognitive Development

• Cornerstone Principles
• Organizationhow we organize new and old ideas,
  thoughts, etc.
• Drive for equilibriumbalance emotional and/or
  mental
• Adaptationability to change behavior to fit the
  environment

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Adaptation

• Schema organized and systematic approach to
  answering questions or solving problems
• Assimilation - involves interpreting new
  experiences in terms of existing mental
  structures without changing them.
• Accommodation - involves changing existing mental
  structures to explain new experiences.

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Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years)

• develop the ability to coordinate sensory input
  with motor actions
• Primary circular reactions actions with own self
  (suck thumb, blow bubbles)
• Secondary circular reactions actions extend to
  outside environment (rattles, making noises over
  and over)
• Tertiary circular reactions some repetition of
  actions, but w/ variations (banging an object on
  different furniture, dinner time utensils!)

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Sensorimotor Stage, cont.

• Object permanence develops when a child
  recognizes that objects continue to exist even
  when they are no longer visible.
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vue8y-JVhjS0
• Leads to mental images, primitive beginning of
  symbolic thought. Basis for all thinking.

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Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)

• gradually improve in the use of mental images.
  Emphasizes the shortcomings of thought processes
  during this stage
• Egocentricism - thinking is characterized by a
  limited ability to share another persons
  viewpoint.

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• Centration - the tendency to focus on just one
  feature of a problem, neglecting other important
  aspects.
• Irreversibility - the inability to envision
  reversing an action.
• Conservation - Piagets term for the awareness
  that physical quantities remain constant in spite
  of changes in their shape or appearance.
  http//www.youtube.com/watch?vGLj0IZFLKvgfeature
  related
• Animism - the belief that all things are living

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Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)

• Concrete images of tangible objects events.
• Decentration - focus on more than one factor
  develop the skill of coordinating several aspects
  of a problem.

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Concrete Operational Stage, cont.

• Reversibility - undo process mentally
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vgA04ew6Oi9MNR1
• Classification - In this stage they begin to
  understand Hierarchical Classification -
  ability to focus simultaneously on two levels
  of classification.
• Start to develop problem-solving skills
• Ex. Carnations Daisies (both flowers)

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Formal Operational Stage (adolescent to adult)

• Begin to understand hypothetical problems and
  situations.
• Characteristics of Formal Thought
• Become more systematic in their problem solving
  not as much trial and error, can envision choices
  and outcomes and use reason to make a choice.
• Cognitive process in this stage can be
  characterized as
• -Abstract Systematic Logical Reflective

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Formal Operational Stage, Video example

• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vzjJdcXA1KH8feature
  related
• Piagets experimentsThis is what your
  experiments will look like!
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vR3U_T6C9NtUfeature
  related

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• Piaget acknowledged that some children may pass
  through the stages at different ages and that
  some children may show characteristics of more
  than one stage at a given time.
• But he insisted that cognitive development always
  follows this sequence, that stages cannot be
  skipped, and that each stage is marked by new
  intellectual abilities and a more complex
  understanding of the world.